Somewhere on the 5400 block of South Woodlawn, there’s a first-floor apartment that may retain a message from 30 years ago. A young photographer concealed his signature on top of a door for posterity, and if it hasn’t been painted over, you might still read the line: “Danny Lyon made ‘The Bikeriders’ here.”
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A New Yorker by birth, Lyon moved to Hyde Park in 1959 to attend the University of Chicago. After graduating in 1963, he traveled south to photograph the civil rights movement for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Though the resulting photos have been widely reproduced–most recently in Lyon’s 1992 book, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement–he felt The Bikeriders was the first of his photographic series that was all his own.
After he showed the first prints to his mentor, Hugh Edwards, then associate curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute (and founder of the museum’s photography department), Edwards wrote Lyon, “This time you have gone farther and present the exciting subject without getting between it and the camera….I like photography best when it is a medium of presentation and does not impose interpretation.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Danny Lyon photo by Jim Medenhall; Photographs from “The Bikeriders” courtesy of Twin Palms Publishers/ Copyright Twin Palms Publishers-“Route 12, Wisconsin” “Racer, Schererville, Indiana” “Route 90, Alabama”.
